Taylor Square

Gunter Christmann was born in Germany but spent most of his adult life within a small geographical area around East Sydney/ Darlinghurst, where his home and studio were located. He was largely self-taught as a painter, and his oeuvre combined abstract and figurative tendencies that often occurred in parallel.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Christmann made a number of figurative paintings on canvas and paper of the two cities that had the most powerful influence on his life and work - Berlin, where he was born (and spent a year's residency in 1973-74), and Sydney, specifically his local area.

Gunter wore a track around his locale. His first room in Sydney was in the Beresford Hotel on Bourke Street, where the cabbie dropped him in 1959; he was thirty-eight years in Burton Street, the flat he shared with his wife Jenny, and ten days in Darlinghurst Road, in the Sacred Heart Hospice. A few blocks link all three places. (Simon Barney 'Urban cosmos' in Lesley Harding, 'Gunter Christmann, now and then', Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2014 p 23).

This painting on paper depicts Oxford Street, Darlinghurst looking west from Taylor Square. It captures in quick, notational brushstrokes the bustle and energy of this busy locale reflecting the strong clarity of Sydney light.